My Kentucky Ancestors, Part 2

(Mercedes Bend farm in 1976. I roamed those hills in late fall, after the first frost, nibbling on wild rose hips.)

When I moved to Iowa City in September 1975 to continue my education at the University of Iowa, I quickly discovered the co-op scene. I was impressed by the folks I met there – vibrant, interesting, talented, inspired by their interest in natural and organic foods, vegetarianism, cooperative enterprise, and communal living. New Pioneer Food Co-op was then located on the corner of Gilbert and Prentiss streets. Blooming Prairie Cooperative Warehouse was two floors above it. Stone Soup Restaurant was operating out of the Center East basement on the corner of Clinton and Jefferson streets. I started working at Stone Soup as a night baker, making whole wheat bread, granola, and beanburgers for both the restaurant and the food co-op. After my shift I’d catch a nap in the empty Yoga Center on the first floor before my morning philosophy class.

Many of the people I met at this time have remained my closest friends. When Pat moved from Santa Cruz to Iowa City that fall, she started working as a baker too. Six years later we were married and starting a family. Many of these friends had a desire to “get back to the land.” They found that the most reasonably priced acreage was often the most unruly – hilly, rocky, wooded, suitable only for subsistence farming. This could describe the Arguing Goats Farm in rural Cedar County, or Mercedes Bend off Highway 1 north of Solon, or the Mozz (short for Mausoleum), an old forsaken farm near Cedar Bluff that John, Sheila, Pam, Jim, and others had revitalized. Such places were generally fine with these hippies, whose goals were modest – raise some chickens for the eggs, a few goats for milk and yogurt, a hive for honey, a garden or orchard for produce to put away for the winter, maybe a few acres of a cash crop of sorghum to make into syrup.

This scenario was playing out everywhere at that time, and in the Central United States it was especially prevalent in the Ozark and Appalachian mountains. Sometimes the hippies and the folks who’d lived there for generations (and who often self-identified as hillbillies) kept their distrustful distance. But sometimes they found a common ground of mutual admiration. Arnie Brawner, a 53-year-old organic farmer from nearby Mount Vernon, became a valuable mentor for my friends living at the Mozz, just one example of that cross-fertilization.

In the spring of 1976, I got an opportunity to visit one of those “unruly places” when I learned there was a spot open in a car of co-op folks heading to East Wind Community in the Missouri Ozarks. East Wind made most of the nut butters sold in bulk at New Pioneer. As a working member, I would often stock their products, opening up 35-pound tubs and stirring in the oils that had separated while the nut butter was in storage. East Wind had invited people to see the operation, offering ingteresting workshops on how to live communally and how to subvert the corporate capitalist paradigm. But I remember best hiking through deep woods and crossing clear mountain creeks with Annette and Sich, who were preparing to homestead a farm in Edmonson County, Kentucky, twenty miles east of where I’d lived two years before that. I felt a spark with Annette and, as we were leaving, made sure to get directions to the farm from her and promised to visit when I had a chance.

That August, I followed up on that promise, but all in good time. I’d just spent two weeks hitchhiking out to Boulder and staying with my friend Tony Hoagland, who was taking classes at the Naropa Institute’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. I’d returned to Iowa City one day before my old high school buddy Michael was passing through on his way to Ohio for the wedding of our friends Jon and Kathy. We met up at the communal household I’d moved into that summer near the corner of Governor and Burlington streets. 

Michael and I arose early to a hearty breakfast of oatmeal with raisins, made a destination sign, rolled some joints, said good-bye to my housemates, crossed the street, stuck out our thumbs, and quickly got a ride out to the interstate. We parked ourselves at the bottom of the ramp, taking turns hitchhiking. The sunny morning was starting to heat up, and no ride for a while until Kevin stopped on his way back to Yale in his climate-controlled Catalina. So we got a ride all the way to Akron, along the way reading, writing, napping, rapping with Kevin, who was young and not all that interesting. As we approached our exit at nine that evening, we got caught in a heavy rainstorm, so Kevin generously took us the extra ten miles into Kent. 

Back in our old haunts, we headed to The Cove, bought a pitcher of beer, and made some calls. It just so happened Jon’s bachelor party was in progress. We called the Brown Derby and found out the group was on its way to the Venice Cafe, just a block from us. We finished our pitcher, smoked a joint out in the alley, and headed to the Venice. It was a rowdy reunion of high school friends, with too many beers being bought for me and my empty stomach. Then Owen invited me outside to share a bowl of hash, and I was stone-cold stoned, rapping wildly and pulling poems out of my pockets. Suddenly we were at the Outpost Lounge, where we slipped a dancer some bucks to perform a slinky, seductive dance for Jon’s benefit. Closing down that dive, we hightailed it to the Chat Noir in downtown Akron. Stepping away from the craziness for a moment, I wondered about this strange tradition, a presumed last chance to taste freedom and wild adventures before settling down, as if marriage itself wasn’t an adventure, as if having and raising children wasn’t the adventure of all time.

I spent the next couple of days with Jon’s family, making multiple batches of bread for them, my customary way of saying thanks, and doing my best to help Jon with wedding plans. I visited Gramma Duer, who was living in a senior center in North Akron, and peppered her with questions about her early life in Kentucky, taking careful notes. The last couple of days before the wedding, I got out of the way and stayed with Benny Semchuck’s family. The wedding was held on a Saturday evening. That day, our old gang got together to go swimming and get high at the quarry swimming hole with its daredevil cliff dives, then to Grins’s house, where we drank beer and shots, listened to Uncle John’s Band “coming to take his children home,” and were handsomely fed to the tune of sweet corn and burgers. We attired ourselves in a bright collage of colors for the ceremony, and as soon as the I-do’s were done, rushed off to Ziggy’s Hall for all the food, booze, old-time friends, pretty women, and dancing we could handle. By three in the morning, we were at Owen’s Cuyahoga Valley pad, drinking coffee laced with gin, finally calling it a day.

Monday morning, I was on my way back to Kentucky, south from Akron into the Appalachian foothills. A ride from an angry, streetwise, big-talking, woman-chasing kid on parole took me into Charleston, West Virginia, home of Agent Orange and antifreeze, mountains of coal, pools of chemical waste, river of salt brine tears, all ratchety hardcore but still brutally beautiful. On a ride to Huntington, I smoked a joint with the driver and helped him deliver flowers to florist shops along the way: “Whaddya think of us hillbillies?” Then a ride from a couple of pimply teenagers skittishly smoking another joint. And then a ride with a couple of guys delivering eggs – two more joints and into eastern Kentucky. Eventually, Gary interpreted the hieroglyphics of my sign and took me all the way to Bowling Green. By 9:30 that evening, I was calling up Pat Berkowetz, a friend from my year living in Butler County; she was working a late shift but let me keep her bed warm for the night.

(Walt and Betty’s eight kids. When I was their neighbor in rural Butler County, I spent as much time playing with them as I did visiting with Walt and Betty.)

The next day I hitched up to Morgantown and arrived just as my former neighbors Walt and Betty Essex were getting ready to move ten miles to Woodbury and a beautiful old three-story house atop a hill overlooking the Green River. They’d be living there rent-free, thanks to the Army Corps of Engineers, in exchange for serving as caretakers for the house that would eventually become the Woodbury Lock and Green River Museum, honoring the days when steamboats plied the river. It was wonderfully roomy, just what they needed for their big family, with a great front porch where I slept. I stayed two days, helping them move in, glad to be of use, going for afternoon swims in the river – and then headed to neighboring Edmonson County to find Tupelo Ridge Farm, and Annette. I got a ride that took me up a dirt road all the way to the farm, meeting Sich and Jean, who as they were getting ready to leave for Bowling Green, told me Annette no longer lived there. I shook off that disappointment and helped them run errands, getting to know this friendly couple who lived on land I’d come to think of as a second home. I admired how they’d wedded the order of a farm and the disorder of the wild. 

The next morning I realized I needed to haul ass back to Akron for my friends Cheryl and Jim’s wedding. I helped Sich milk their cows, picked a couple bushels of tomatoes, ate breakfast, and reluctantly said goodbye to these young farmers and their land. I started walking down the dry dusty road toward the Western Kentucky Parkway, a car coming along every fifteen minutes or so, but the country was so beautiful I didn’t care. I finally caught a ride to Louisville and eventually made it back to Benny’s house by nine the next morning, discovering that the wedding was at eleven. Whew! Just enough time to take a much-needed shower, get dressed, and head over to Coz’s house for prenuptial drinks. The Kentucky poet-farmer Wendell Berry has written, “One who returns home – to one’s marriage and household and place in the world – desiring anew what was previously chosen, is neither the world’s stranger nor its prisoner, but is at once in place and free.” In those days, I was starting to figure out exactly what he meant by that.